Finished “Anna Karenina” finally. Marvelous and all-encompassing, though less marvelous and less all-encompassing (can something be less all-encompassing?) than Proust, and too long, like Mahler’s Ninth. Both Tolstoy and Mahler say little in their leisurely span that can’t be said more tersely — although terser they wouldn’t be Mahler and Tolstoy. Everything’s too long. Webern is too long. This paragraph is too long.

Needless to say, we have to distinguish between too-long-and-brilliant (“Paradise Lost,” “War and Peace”) and too-long-and-stupid (“The Dark Knight,” “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida”). It’s easy to name classic works of literature that overstay their welcome. The seven volumes of “Clarissa” are, for some of us, about six and a half too many. As for “Moby-Dick,” zillions have wished it shorter. And even the most ardent Joycean wouldn’t claim that every word between “riverrun” and “the” is absolutely essential.

But are there good or great novels you think could have been longer, or should have been longer? That’s not so easy. One colleague voted for “Atonement.” Another editor here said, “When I finished ‘Middlemarch,’ I was sorry it was over.” A friend who teaches English at Rutgers had a bunch of suggestions: “Great Expectations,” “Goodbye, Columbus,” “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” “When We Were Orphans,” Endo’s “Deep River” and “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” (“It easily could have been twice as long”). Another friend — not an editor and not a professor; i.e., a normal person — immediately nominated “Kaaterskill Falls.”

I’d come up with some nominees myself, but this post is already too long.

Wow, what a question. I can’t think of too many books I’ve ever wished to be longer. There are ones I could mention like “Lolita” or “Howard’s End,” but they wouldn’t be as good as they are if they kept going. Their stopping-places was mapped out early on.

The ones the Rutgers teacher mentions are absolutely fine as they are. Interesting that he mentioned “Goodbye, Columbus,” because to me that’s a perfect short novel that captures the whole Jewish-American world of the 1950s: self-consciousness, acquisitiveness, racism, nose jobs, etc., etc. Too bad Roth didn’t apply the same sense of economy to the follow-up, “Letting Go,” which ought to be called “Let `Er Rip” — it’s an endless Jane-stop-this-crazy-thing mess.

Though longer than most things by a great deal, I wished that Don Quixote had been longer, perhaps about long enough to last my lifetime. Then I could dip into the story of the Knight of the Rueful Figure and his squire whenever I liked, and finish when I am just about done.

I definitely do not second “An American Tragedy.” The courtroom scene itself seemed interminable. I would, however, second “Atonement.” I could have used some more time at Dunkirk, with Robbie and Cecilia at Cambridge, or concerning Briony’s later life. Though probably not all of them.

How can anyone plausibly claim that a Dickens book should be longer? I love Great Expectations, but it’s absolutely complete as it is, and there are enough other Dickens novels that demonstrate the downside of stretching out the story for the sake of extended serialization, to the detriment of the plot.

I’d like Pride & Prejudice to be longer, in terms of going into Lydia and Wickham’s louche living in London, or exploring what Darcy does with himself during the months he disappears from the story, but for obvious reasons, Jane Austen couldn’t have included those details. It was nice that the BBC mini-series delved a little into the former issue.

To conclude: yes, an excellent, piercing question. Essential to loving a ‘perfect’ piece is its ripeness; more or less would ruin that. (Part of) what completes a perfectly attuned reading is that it departs us completedly (which is no argument against ending openly, ambiguously). The text, having become a done deed, now can continue doing, with neither not enough nor extra; it must die in order to become immortal.

So, “long” and “short” are categorically subordinate to ‘effective’- how do you feel and what do you think as caused by conversing with this novel, this poem? Addition or subtraction are appropriate not with respect to length, taken as an impossibly empty measurement, but rather with respect to some particular matrix of meaning-generation: more or less ‘this’ and ‘that’.

Where, exactly, does Homer nod? Which of Dickinson’s lyrics call for exfoliation within the poem? (Of course, you may be going the inefficacious direction between “riverrun” and “the”.)

Let me contradict myself: the Georgics, being a poem and not the mind of a farm, delights too briefly, Shakespeare’s apparently unattempted plays on Arthur and Henry VII are too snuffed, and Welles’s Faustus and Quixote are too unfilmed.

Still here? It’s taken you too long to read this post– whose fault is that?

Believe it or not, when I first read A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, which went on for something like 1400 pages (but which felt more like reading seven Austen novels in a row), I wished it didn’t have to end so soon. That said, I think it had an absolutely perfect ending.

It’s funny that you mention “Goodbye, Columbus.” Roth, through his 25+ novels, has shown himself to be a master of the novel form. That he would debut with such a short piece has always struck me as odd.

Don’t get me wrong — that novella is absolutely perfect in it’s length, tone and arc — but I always wondered how his career would have been different if he debuted with his 2nd book, “Letting Go.”

No great work of art is “absolutely fine” (or “absolutely complete”) as it is. Great art always suggests possibilities imagined and not realized: hence, we wonder about Darcy, and the Don, and Dorothea. If you think “Ulysses” resolves itself, clearly you are not contemplating about what might happen next to Leopold, Molly, and Stephen. On the other hand, bad art like “Clarissa” should have limits. I can appreciate Richardson’s technique, and yes, he certainly brings a level of psychological depth to the English novel. However, Richardson is no Austen, or Cervantes, or Joyce. Hence, the need for boundaries.

By the way, a difference I sense between bad art and trash is this simple fact: in the former (e.g., “Clarissa”)the closure gives you a feeling of relief (“it’s over”). The latter–let’s say “The DaVinci Code”–provides one with guilt over its dreadful pleasure(s). You know “Clarissa” is a “literary masterpiece,” but let’s face it.

I first tackled The Forsyte Saga in my late teens, as I recall, and had a pretty good go at it, penetrating some 300 pages into the text. But not even the extensive family tree included in the book could keep me going beyond that. It was too dry for my teen interests.

When Masterpiece Theatre gave it the royal treatment, I eagerly watched the whole thing, and some episodes more than once. They did a bang-up job, with an excellent cast.

People used to say that the book was better than the movie. I think that is less true today, depending of course on cast and director. The truth is, the book is no longer the sole exhibitor of the story. Some times the movie makes me want to return to the source text. But less often today. I’m quite certain I will never again open the Galsworthy book. Too many stories, too little time. Sigh.

Borges’s ‘Library Of Babel’ is, to me, perfect. Which is why this topic is so fun. I want to know what these librarians thought about their lives, what kind of things happen to them over a course of a lifetime, but I never will.

I always wanted just one more section of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, describing either the Creature’s morose self-immolation or Captain Waldon’s defeated return to his sister (or both!). It would be a lot like Marlowe skulking home after Kurtz’ death in Heart of Darkness, I think… only better, since it’s Mrs. Shelley!

Is thirty years too long? If you published and republished the same essay for 30 long years, and it made no sense, and nobody noticed, that would be an essay–about 360 months long!

When Shoshana Felman began publishing her interpretation of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” it was way back in 1977. In between then and now, it has shown up in her Stanford book on writing and madness, as the dominant reading in the second Norton Critical Edition of James’s novella, and in its latest botched version, in the Felman reader, “The Claims of Literature,” the new errors of which in the “T.S.” essay I will let readers find.

This has to be a world record for “length.” Most authors are satisfied with one hundred or even one thousand pages. Only Shoshana Felman insists on thirty years of republication in different formats of the same impossibly wrong reading.

I will give you one clue: One of the latest depredations is to skip whole sentences.

I wish the Bible was longer. I would add recipes. Then we would know what stuff tasted like in Bible times! Also, did you realize that Godot never shows up? I’m like, “Hell-o-o!” Godot should show up and apologize for being late. And take those guys to dinner, his treat. We don’t have to see that part. They can just walk offstage and we’ll figure out that they went to dinner.

If “Middlemarch” were any longer, I would have jumped from the top of it a thousand times trying to crush my own skull. It gets my vote for the longest, never-really-all-that-good novel ever considered great by a majority of Qualified Readers.

I was sad when “Infinite Jest” ended. I know it’s overlong, but I’ve never had more fun reading a book in my life. Half of it was the challenge of taming it.

A book that ends too early isn’t a complete book, and no one cares that it ended too early, because it didn’t amount to much. But a book that ends when it should will always seem too short, because in its pages is another world, which the reader has to leave. All good books end before you do, is another way of putting this.

Here is a reading that I find to be too long in any format or under any guise. In “The Claims of Literature,” the Shoshana Felman reader published by Fordham University Press, 2007, with the editors’ acknowledgments to the Colgate University Research Council, and to the “careful efforts” of Jason Lusthaus and Kelly McGowan, we find this sentence (p. 26):

The vulgar is the literal, insofar as it is unambiguous: “the story won’t tell; not in any literal, constitutive of meaning, because it blocks and interrupts the endless process of metaphorical substitution.

Now let’s compare it with two sentences from the same essay on “The Turn of the Screw” in Felman’s “Writing and Madness,” Stanford University Press, 2003 (p. 153):

The vulgar is the literal, insofar as it is unambiguous: “the story won’t tell; not in any literal, vulgar way.” The literal is “vulgar” because it stops the movement constitutive of meaning, because it blocks and interrupts the endless process of metaphorical substitution.

This is not the only bungled sentence of this type in the Felman reader essay on James. Now, nobody wants to be cruel about the practices at university presses, or the bungling at Norton that caused the editors to choose Felman’s reading as the primary one in the second Critical Edition of The Turn of the Screw. However, the Felman misreading, along with its perpetuation as a virus on studies of James, is a typically New York and Boston-style critical disaster, doubly objectionable for what should be the upcoming Year of Henry James, in 2009. The curious silence of James scholars about the manifest errors in Felman and in another important critic’s philosophical view of “The Wings of the Dove” should be examined by The New York Times.

Nothingness depletes the world. Garbled information practices caused 9/11. Is it possible to learn from the past?

You refer bull’seyeingly to “books that end when they should”; these are books whose length is harmonious with their meaning, their impact, the feeling and thought they cause or enable or disclose.

But, for me, you miss the mark when you write of those books’ “[worlds] the reader has to leave”. If some particular book is superbly appropriate, a masterpiece in your experience, you don’t “leave” it, because it never leaves you; it stains the glass of your eye for as long as your memory of it participates in your seeing. “[G]ood books” don’t “end before you do”; their being “good” in the way you well phrase means they come to constitute you as you become- they become you.

Yes, the reading of books we love “seem[s] too short”, but this appearing calls for a phenomenology of bittersweetness, a knowing savoring of finitude- without which sense there’s no discernment of fine writing from crappy, as you suggest. Against romanticism vulgarly indulged, romance, with books as between people, doesn’t mean pretending ‘it can last for ever'; romance means ‘it’s worth doing as attentively as possible, however brief the doing feels later’.

I disagree about The Dark Knight: I thought it elevated the superhero movie, a usually trivial form, to an art not far removed from the original Brothers Grimm — dark, complicated, revelatory of the nobility and self-motivated selfishness and evil that simultaneously drive all of us.

As for the broader point, though, I think that the works that leave us wanting more are just the right length, and I can think of plenty: Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God; several Kurt Vonnegut books (Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions); the better stories of Andre Dubus, Lee K. Abbott, Antonya Nelson, and Richard Bausch, plenty of films, even longish ones, by Coppola, Scorcese, Paul Schrader; the entire literary output of Tobias Wolff; Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl; early John McPhee (Oranges, Levels of the Game, The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, The Curve of Binding Energy); all of Lydia Davis; Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here;” William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow and Time Will Darken It; plenty of Philip Roth (Sabbath’s Theater, American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Counterlife); Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Unbearable Lightness of Being; etc., etc., etc. . . . . .

Im almost through reading “Savage Detectives” right now. I thought it was terribly clever for the first 300 pages or so(not quite halfway), but wound up putting it aside for a few weeks soon after that. All told I’m glad I picked it back up and I understand that its meant to be expansive, but i think it could have accomplished its purpose without sprawling quite so much. Could also just be the translation…books in translation always seem to loose something.